Here are two things that are awesome:

Catholic Church Fashion Show from Federico Fellini’s Roma. I won’t try to describe it. Just watch it.

Featurette: The Eyes of Laura Mars — Helmut Newton and Rebecca Blake photographs, a lovely Faye Dunaway, a young Brad Dourif (aka Doc from Deadwood), and magnificently extreme late seventies styles. (Personal to garretfw: if you ever need to appear in costume, I think you’d be an excellent Dunaway-esque Laura Mars.)

Oh, and an extra awesome thing, unrelated to decadent fashion unless you consider Guys and Dolls costumes to be examples of same: thanks to caitiecait for letting me know that a passage from Empress is up on literaryquotes!

 I don’t know what constitutes “noir” in 2007. I mean, would The Wire be noir? I don’t think so. Actually, noir—I was taught in college—is a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism. Anyway, that’s the way some critics have looked at it. I think that a show like The Wire is the closest we come these days to naturalism. It’s a genuine, authentic attempt at naturalism. I’ve never really attempted naturalism before, but I value it a lot, so all of its more baroque forms have been very valuable to me. One of them, I think, is noir.

Totally read the rest of the interview, too.

But that’s gonna change this weekend, and I am super excited. For the first time since I’ve lived in Portland, I am making the drive down to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Has anyone besides quirkybird been before? Anything I must see while I’m in Ashland? It will be my first time in Ashland, too…

Actually that’s a lie. I have a fantastic bread box with two compartments, one labeled Bread, the other Cake. But it is extremely old and rusty and I use it to store all my old journals:

But anyway, the point is that we don’t have a bread box suitable for bread storage. This totally wasn’t a problem until Snag entered our lives and we discovered his affinity for gnawing through bread wrappers and consuming portions of several slices.

Then I had the genius idea that we could keep the entire loaf of bread inside the toaster oven. Same size, more or less, as a bread box, same functionality. Take that, I thought, you little carb-seeking missile. It worked! We’ve enjoyed our bread un-gnawed for months.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

You’re right.

Today Snag learned how to open the toaster oven.

And speaking of the studio, and thus of comics, you, yes, you over there in the glasses*, have you turned in your Stumptown table registration? The show is happening earlier this year, the weekend of September 29th and 30th, and registrations are due August 31st.

I quote from the website: “We’ll still be accepting registrations after that, but we can’t guarantee your choice of placement, or a listing in the official Fest Program, so please get your forms in asap! Table prices are still at a low $110 for a full table, and $70 for a half table, and the registration forms can be found here.”

*Glasses are not mandatory for Stumptown, merely, based on my observation last year, pervasive.

“They just figure, hey, I got the contract, why do I have to do anything now?”

“Oh no. It’s not like that. No, I’m telling you, every single player in the NFL’s got quotas to make. Yardage per game. I’m telling you.”

“Quotas. Just like us.”

They stare at each other briefly, glumly. It’s only another few seconds before one asks another how many deals he made yesterday, and they return to Glengarry Glen Ross-style weaponized conversational gambits. If they’d ever really departed.

And that’s saying something.

Good thing I’m going to be up late packing anyway…